Ibn Taymiya
is Ahmad ibn Abd al-Salaam ibn Abdullah, Abu al-Abbas Taqi al-Din ibn
Taymiya al-Harrani, born in Harran, east of Damascus, in 661/1263. A famous
Hanbali scholar in Qur'anic exegesis (tafsir), hadith and jurisprudence,
Ibn Taymiya was a voracious reader and author of great personal courage
who was endowed with a compelling writing style and a keen memory. Dhahabi
wrote of him, "I never saw anyone faster at recalling the Qur'anic verses
dealing with subjects he was discussing, or anyone who could remember hadith
texts more vividly." Dhahabi estimates that his legal opinions on various
subjects amount to three-hundred or more volumes.

He was imprisoned
during much of his life in Cairo, Alexandria, and Damascus for his writings,
scholars of his time accusing him of believing Allah to be a corporeal
entity because of what he mentioned in his al-aqida al-Hamawiyya
and al-Wasitiyya and other works, such as that Allah's 'hand',
'foot', 'shin' and 'face' are literal (haqiqi) attributes, and
that He is upon the Throne in person. The error in this is suggesting
such attributes are literal is an innovation and unjustifiable inferance
from the Qur'anic and hadith texts that mention them, for the way of early
Muslims was mere acceptance of such expressions on faith without saying
how they are meant, and without additions, subtractions, or substituting
meanings imagined to be synonyms, while acknowledging Allah's absolute
transcedence beyond the characteristics of created things, in conformity
with the Qur'anic verse "There is nothing whatsoever like unto him" [Qur'an
42:11]. As for figurative interpretations that preserve the divine transcendence,
scholars of tenents of faith have only had recourse to them in times when
men of reprehensible innovation (bid'a), quoting hadiths and Qur'anic
verses, have caused confusion in the minds of common Muslims as to whether
Allah has attributes like those of His creation or whether He is transcendently
beyond any image conceivable to the minds of men. Scholars' firmness in
condemning those who have raised such confusions has traditionally been
very uncompromising, and this is no doubt the reason that a number of
the Imams of the Shafi'i school, among them Taqi al-Din Subki, Ibn Hajar
Haytami and al-Izz ibn Jama'a, gave formal legal opinions (fatawa)
that ibn Taymiya was misguided and misguiding in tenents of faith, and
warned people from accepting his theories. The Hanafi scholar Muhammad
Zahid al-Kawthari has written "Whoever thinks that all the scholars of
his time joined in a single conspiracy against him from personal envy
should rather impugn their own intelligence and understanding, after studying
the repugnance of his deviations in beliefs and works, for which he was
asked to repent time after time and moved from prison to prison until
he passed on to what he'd sent ahead."

While few
deny that ibn Taymiya was a copious and eloquent writer and hadith scholar,
his career, like that of others, demonstrates that a man may be outstanding
in one field and yet suffer from radical deficiencies in another, the
most reliable index of which is how a field's Imams regard his work in
it. By this measure, indeed, by the standards of all previous Ahl al-Sunna
scholars, it is clear that despite voluminous and influential written
legacy, ibn Taymiya cannot be considered an authority on tenents of faith
('aqida), a field in which he made mistakes profoundly incompatible
with the beliefs of Islam, as also with a number of his legal views that
violated the scholarly consensus (ijma) of Sunni Muslims. It should
be remembered that such matters are not the province of personal reasoning
(ijtihad), whether Ibn Taymiya considered them to be so out of
sincere conviction, or whether simply because, as Imam Subki said, "his
learning exceeded his intelligence." He died in Damascus in 728/1328.